Chen Duxiu, Founder of the Chinese Communist Party [Course Book ed.] 9781400858057

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
PREFACE
CHAPTER ONE. PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU
CHAPTER TWO. AWAKENING YOUTH
CHAPTER THREE. REVOLUTIONARY TEACHER IN ANHUI
CHAPTER FOUR. THE POLITICS OF CULTURE
CHAPTER FIVE. PARTY FOUNDER CHEN DUXIU
CHAPTER SIX. THE UNITED FRONT
CHAPTER SEVEN. CHEN DUXIU IN OPPOSITION
EPILOGUE
GLOSSARY OF IMPORTANT TERMS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

CHEN DUXIU

Chen Duxiu FOUNDER OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY

BY LEE FEIGON

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1983 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book ISBN 0-691-05393-6 This book has been composed in Linotron Sabon Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Paperbacks, although satisfactory for personal collections, are not usually suitable for library rebinding. Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

To My Parents, Gershon and Ethel Feigon, for their help and their kindness. Their devotion to learning and ideas has been an inspiration to me.

CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

ix

PREFACE

xi

CHAPTER ONE: PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

3

CHAPTER TWO: AWAKENING YOUTH

23

"Fatherless Child"

24

Student of Tradition

28

Coming of Age

34

The Anhui Patriotic Society

40

The Youth Culture

48

Call to Arms

55

CHAPTER THREE: REVOLUTIONARY TEACHER IN ANHUI

60

The Anhui Common Speech Journal

60

Vernacular Revolution

68

The Use of Tradition

72

The Rebel: Teacher and Warrior

74

National Essence

84

Upper versus Lower Gentry

87

Gentry Revolution in Anhui

90

CHAPTER FOUR: THE POLITICS OF CULTURE Dean of the New Culture

96 98

The Politics of the Uncompromising Scholar

105

The Debate over Confucius

115

The Literary Revolution Continues

122

Out of the Ivory Tower

128

New Vocabulary, Traditional Style

132

CHAPTER FIVE: PARTY FOUNDER CHEN DUXIU

137

Foreign Model

138

The Socialist Alternative

140

viii

CONTENTS

The Party of the Elite

147

Ambivalence to Strong Central Authority

152

Party Organization and Societal Development: Chen, Lenin, and Marx

156

The Communist International

162

CHAPTER SIX: THE UNITED FRONT

166

The Difficulties of an Independent Party

167

The Failure of an Alternative to the KMT

170

Advantages of the KMT

173

The "Block Within" Strategy

175

Theoretical Confusion

176

The Independent Proletarian Economic Revolution

180

The Meddling of the International

185

Chen on Social Revolution

188

Scapegoat

191

CHAPTER SEVEN: CHEN DUXIU IN OPPOSITION

196

Trotskyist New Youth

197

Trotskyist Critique

199

Expulsion

204

The Leftist Opposition

210

Urban Revolutionary

216

Last Attempts at Political Influence

220

The End

224

EPILOGUE

230

GLOSSARY

237

BIBLIOGRAPHY

245

INDEX

271

ILLUSTRATIONS follow page 95

ABBREVIATIONS

AHSHB

Anhui suhua bao [Anhui Vernacular Paper]

DXWC

Duxiu wencun [Chen Duxiu's Collected Writings]

KMT

Guomindang

MZPL

Meizhou pinglun [Weekly Critic]

QN

Qingnian [Youth]

XQN

Xin Qingnian [New Youth]

PREFACE

Chen Duxiu, the man who led the New Culture movement and founded the Chinese Communist party, was a towering presence in modern Chinese history. In attempting to measure his influence, the standard one-dimensional comparisons are not sufficient. Too often, Chen and other modern Chinese political figures have been judged purely in terms of their thought, divorced from the deeds they helped inspire. By these criteria, many modern Chinese theorists seem considerably less rigorous than the Westerners to whom they have been compared. How many times, for instance, has it been said that the turn-of-the-century Chinese reformer, intellectual, and political leader Liang Qichao (1873-1929) was just as pro­ found as his contemporary, Max Weber, in his critiques of the failure of European civilization following World War I? Comparisons such as that of Liang to Weber often take on a defensive tone that suggests that it is somehow astonishing that Chinese thinkers, too, can be profound. But Chen Duxiu, like other important Chinese political fig­ ures, never considered spending year after year in the British Museum trying to work out his ideas and discipline his thought, as did someone such as the Communist philosopher Karl Marx. Ideas in China earned one respect and hence the potential for engaging in political action—the ultimate object of all thought. Since theory gave one a political following, there were few political theorists (at least within the Confucian tradition) who did not serve, at one stage or another of their careers, as officials or political actors. Why, therefore, should these Chinese thinker-politicians be compared with Western intellectuals rather than with Western politicians? It is common to compare the thoughts of Chen Duxiu with those of Karl Marx but not with those of poli­ ticians such as Gerald Ford or Dwight Eisenhower. When seen

xii

PREFACE

in this light, the thought of Chen, Mao, and the others would seem disciplined beyond belief. It is true that there are the examples of Lenin and Trotsky, who were thinkers as well as political actors. And in fact Chen and even Mao are more often compared with these political leaders than with Marx; this study makes the same compar­ ison. To the extent that Lenin and Trotsky wrote primarily to legitimize their cause among their followers and convince them to take action, their theoretical writings (if they were in fact theory and not simply tactics) may be compared to those of Chen or Mao. The breadth of Chen Duxiu's works was, however, far greater than that of his Russian counterparts. The tradition of the Chinese intellectual, which Chen followed, was that of the generalist who had to prove himself in many areas of Chinese social and cultural life before he could develop a following. Potential Russian political and intellectual leaders did not have to face such a test. This need for Chinese intellectuals to immerse themselves in their society to establish credentials may partially explain the tendency noted by Benjamin Schwartz that the Chinese radical intelligentsia were far less alienated from their society than the Russian intelligentsia.1 Unlike Lenin or Trotsky, Chen may be said to have thought and breathed Chinese culture throughout his entire life. He was not simply concerned with political theory but made contributions to traditional philo­ logical scholarship, literature, and the arts; he also helped introduce Western geographical, military, and scientific con­ cepts to China. Though Chen may not have contributed as much to any one field as did Lenin or Trotsky, the range of his contributions far exceeds anything contemplated by these great Russian leaders. In the end, Chen simply could not keep up with his own accomplishments. Traditionally, political alliances in China have been more casual and personal, dependent as they were 1 Benjamin Schwartz, "The Intelligentsia in Communist China: ATentative Comparison," Daedalus, Summer 1960, pp. 604-21.

PREFACE

xiii

on the intellectual legitimacy of the leader. Chen was the first to use his personal legitimacy to build a disciplined bureau­ cratic political organization. But having acquired legitimacy under the traditional system, he never quite felt comfortable with that organization, nor could he control it. When faced with a similar problem, Mao chose to tear down the organ­ ization he had constructed rather than allow himself to be pushed from the scene, as was Chen. Though Chen's personal legitimacy ultimately was destroyed, his influence, spreading over many areas of Chinese culture and society, was indelible. Thus, if we multiply the standard one-dimensional assess­ ments of the depth of Chen Duxiu's thought by the enormous breadth of his interests over so many cultural areas, and by the wide span of time over which his influence has lasted, the three-dimensional reality of Chen's being and importance can be seen as imposing indeed. In making this study, I am indebted to more people than I could possibly remember to thank. But there are three people whose generosity and insights have probably contributed more to this book than I have. The first of these is my wife Leanne. It is customary in studies of this kind to put in a note of thanks to one's spouse, especially when she or he has helped with typing or editing. In my case, the aid and support Leanne has given me has been enormous. Leanne has spent days and nights, sometimes to the wee hours of the morning, assisting me with this study at the expense of her own work. She is my best friend, confidante, and critic. I also owe more than I can explain in an acknowledgment page to Maurice Meisner. Maurie has been a teacher and adviser to me, helping me with grants and letters, providing me with suggestions on new approaches to take, and giving me encouragement when I needed it. Maurie has also been a guiding light in helping me get back on course when I went off on ridiculous tangents or took a wrong turn. The third person to whom I want to give a special note of appreciation is Professor Lin Maosheng of the Department of Party History of the People's University in Beijing. Professor

xiv

PREFACE

Lin was extraordinarily generous to me with both his time and his ideas during my stay in China in the 1980-81 aca­ demic year. Although our ideas and approaches to Chen were often different and there was much material that he was un­ able to show me, Professor Lin spent several months of his time discussing his ideas on Chen Duxiu with me and allowing me to benefit from the insights gained from his thirty years of research on the topic. He is a true teacher and scholar, and I am enormously indebted to him. Additionally, there are numerous librarians and scholars, most of whose names I never knew, who have aided me in my research in libraries throughout the United States, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, and China. There are also dozens of other people who have either kindly shared experiences with me or have given me ideas for new sources of information. I would particularly like to thank Joe Miller, whom I have never met but who went to great trouble to send materials from Australia to China for me. I am also grateful to Cha Shijie and Zhao Yashu for helping me during my stay in Taiwan. Additionally, I would like to thank Yang Youwei, my Chinese teacher in Taiwan, who first interested me in Chen Duxiu and personally copied the original articles on Chen Duxiu that I used in beginning the research on my Ph.D. dissertation for the Uni­ versity of Wisconsin, Madison. A number of people who have seen parts of this manuscript shared their ideas on it with me. Roger Bowen, Ben Elman, Wang Fanxi through the kind intercession of Gregor Benton, Herman Mast, and Richard Kagan have all given me valued suggestions for changes. A great deal of the material covered in this study would have been missed without the aid of Ding Yeo. I was fortunate in having the benefit of her insights and fortitude first in Taiwan and then in the U.S., when she became a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin and later at Harvard. Many of my most important contacts came as a result of the intercession of Ding Yeo. I would also like to thank Chu-chu Liang and Joan Langley for their aid with the calligraphy. I want to thank Miriam Brokaw for her patience and support and Alice Calaprice for her careful editorial com-

PREFACE

xv

ments and advice. Finally, I would like to thank Kathy Childs, who helped assemble the bibliography and index for me. This study has been completed as the result of a Fulbright research grant to China for 1980-81 and as the result of earlier grants to Taiwan from the University of Wisconsin, NDEA Title VI, and Colby College. Once again, I would like to thank my wife, Leanne, and my two daughters, Maia and Brooke. November 19, 1982 China, Maine

CHEN DUXIU

CHAPTER ONE

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU The year 1879 marked the birth of two men who would exercise enormous influence over the shape of modern history, Leon Bronstein in Russia and Chen Duxiu in China. Acutely aware of the "backwardness" of their homelands in relation to the advanced industrial states of Western Europe, both men would be concerned with the adaptation of Marxism under these conditions and would play seminal roles in the estab­ lishment of the Communist parties of their respective coun­ tries. Furthermore, Leon Bronstein and Chen Duxiu would both be identified with the cosmopolitan or internationalist wings of their parties in an era in which "socialism in one country" came to be a Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The two were finally expelled from the parties they had helped establish and both were vilified by their former comrades. Yet despite their shared birth year and similar historical roles, these two figures differed greatly in their eventual fame. The revolutionary theories and actions of Leon Bronstein, later known as Trotsky, created profound controversy and continue to excite interest to this day, not only in the Soviet Union but in the entire world. Chen Duxiu has rarely been credited for his ideas and activities in China or in the West, even though his contributions to the Chinese Revolution were of at least equal importance. Indeed, his influence cannot be understated: with the possible exception of Mao Zedong, it would be hard to find someone whose ideas and actions have had greater consequences for modern Chinese history than Chen Duxiu. His contributions included everything from the introduction of punctuation in Chinese writing to the estab­ lishment of the Chinese Communist party. He helped to guide the Republican revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty

4

CHAPTER ONE

in 1911, he was the major leader of the New Culture move­ ment between 1915 and 1919, and he served as the first sec­ retary-general of the Chinese Communist party. Still, Chen Duxiu was pushed into a political no man's land. Rejected by those with whom he had worked most closely, he died in obscurity. The Chinese Communists hounded him out of the very party he had helped found—ironically, for his Trotskyist beliefs—in 1929, condemning him as an "opportunist" and "renegade." On the other side, the Chinese Nationalist regime, which once touted Chen's late-in-life reconversion to the prin­ ciples of democracy, still shuns him not only for his Com­ munist activities but also for his earlier role as a zealous op­ ponent of Chinese tradition. Trotsky also is considered a nonperson today by the Russian Communist party that he once led. Within the Soviet Union all references to his name and deeds have been removed from the official history of the Bolshevik Revolution. But Trotsky before his fall was a successful revolutionary who helped cre­ ate one of the major upheavals of this century. Thus Trotsky's actions, even after his exile from the land of his birth, drew headlines throughout the world. Chen, by way of contrast, was a revolutionary failure. After 1927 his name was men­ tioned even less outside of China than inside the country. But Chen's failure to lead a successful revolution is only a partial reason for the lack of attention that has been paid to Chen outside of China. Unlike Trotsky, whose revolutionary ideals were formed in no small part because of his alienation from the mainstream of Russian society, Chen's revolutionary goals were largely a product of his immersion in Chinese society. One of the major points of this study is that although Chen was known for his relentless attacks on Chinese tradition, his success as a revolutionary was achieved precisely because of his ability to manipulate the tradition he was attacking. This is not surprising. Unlike most well-known foreign revolution­ aries such as Trotsky or the generation of Chinese revolu­ tionaries that followed Chen Duxiu, Chen and the Chinese of his generation were absorbed in the traditions of their society.

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

5

As Maurice Meisner has put it: ". . . the very intensity of his assault on traditional values and his strident calls for West­ ernization reflected the influence that those values once ex­ erted on him."1 Chen's reliance on Chinese tradition at the same time as he was attacking it has not been very well understood by most who have studied Chen. The failure to understand this point has affected our understanding of the entire period of history that Chen influenced. A prime example of this can be seen in the common scholarly view of Chen's role in the New Culture movement, when Chen led a withering attack on virtually all aspects of Chinese tradition. Ironically, this aspect of Chen's life that has been explored the most has been understood the least. Most studies of the New Culture movement period have failed to ask why Chen's critique of many features of the traditional society were so persuasive to a generation of people who grew up in that tradition. Assuming the appeal of West­ ern values, these studies have been content with taking Chen's attacks on the old culture at face value, identifying Chen as an all-out Westernizer who advocated science and democracy as the solution to China's woes. Benjamin Schwartz, writing in his pioneering study of Chen in 1951, called Chen "a man deeply involved in the situation of his country who has jet­ tisoned traditional Chinese solutions and is anxiously looking Westward for new solutions. . .. Chen's avowed aim is to eliminate the traditional Chinese pattern of life and thought and to substitute a modern, Western pattern of life and thought."2 This dislike for his own tradition, Schwartz as­ serted, led Chen to distrust narrow patriotic sentiment because he, "like many European liberals," regarded it as an anach­ ronism, one which was apt to lead to the exaltation of "na­ tionalism."3 Since 1951, Western historians of China have 1 Maurice

Meisner, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism, p.

45. 2 Benjamin

Schwartz, "Ch'en Tu-hsiu and the Acceptance of the Modern West," Journal of the History of Ideas, Jan. 1951, p. 63. 3 Ibid.

6

CHAPTER ONE

been virtually unanimous in their agreement with Schwartz's description of Chen.4 Indeed, it has become axiomatic to assert that during the period from 1915 to 1921, Chen was the key representative, or at least a major proponent, of Western "lib­ eral" values. Moreover, most would agree with Schwartz's contention that Chen represented international or cosmopol­ itan tendencies during an era characterized by its vehement nationalism.5 To be sure, Professor Lin Yu-sheng has recently attempted to show what he calls the "cultural intellectualist" assump­ tions of Confucianism in what he sees as Chen's insistence on the priority of intellectual over social change prior to 1921.6 Still, even Professor Lin agrees that Chen was a radical icon­ oclast who was interested in the introduction of Western ideas into China. Most Chinese Communist writers have likewise viewed Chen Duxiu's role during the initial stages of the May Fourth period as that of a cosmopolitan intellectual interested in introducing Western bourgeois ideas of "science and democracy" into China during the so-called "bourgeois-democratic" phase of the Chinese Revolution.7 To be sure, not all Chinese Com­ munist authors have felt Chen's legacy from this period to be a positive one. Ever since Chen's expulsion from the party in 1929, most Chinese Marxist historians have been very uneasy about just how to assess Chen's obviously massive contri4 See, for instance, Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement·, also Thomas Kuo, Ch'en Tu-hstu and the Chinese Communist Movement·, D.W.Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought·, Jerome Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-nl937, idem, Intellectuals and the State in Modern China·, and Meisner, Li Ta-chao. 5 For the most recent and eloquent exposition of this, see Grieder, Intel­ lectuals and the State. 6 Lin Yu-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era. 7 For a good survey of Chinese Communist attitudes toward Chen Duxiu, see Lin Maosheng, "Guanyu Chen Duxiu yanjiu de yixie wenti" [A few problems in researching Chen Duxiu], in Zhongguo renmin daxue dangshixi dangshi jinxiuban jianggao [An outline of a lecture for a class of advanced studies in party history for the party history department of People's Univer­ sity], no. 6, Sept. 23, 1980.

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

7

butions to the early years of the Chinese Revolution. This was most apparent during the years of the Cultural Revolution in the late sixties, when it was claimed that "every pore on Chen Duxiu's body was stained with the blood of the people."8 During this time those who had previously implied in writing or even sometimes in conversations that "Chen had made some positive contributions during the May Fourth period" were criticized, and "some were even expelled from the party for this reason."9 This harsh assessment of Chen's activities prior to 1919 has been generally repudiated in China since 1976. An article in the Liberation Daily in 1979 attempted to sum up the attitude toward Chen: "It was Chen Duxiu who criticized the old feudal ethic, propagated the new thought, and founded the literary revolution. He was the most influential leader and 'bright star' of intellectual circles during the May Fourth pe­ riod."10 With cosmopolitanism again in vogue and with an interest in Western ideas and technology once more fashion­ able in China, the party has again begun to evaluate positively what it considers to be Chen's earlier role in popularizing Western ideas in China. But if Chinese historians of Chen's New Culture movement activities would appear to have again shifted to a generally sympathetic view of his supposed role in Westernizing Chinese thought, their Soviet counterparts are still skeptical. Not sur­ prisingly, Russian historians do not tend to be impressed by what others see as Chen's fascination with Western bourgeois democratic ideas and institutions. Soviet historians tend to stress the period after 1919 when Chen came under the influ­ ence of the Bolshevik Revolution and became one of the first 8 Lin Maosheng, "Dui Chen Duxiu pingjia de jige wenti" [Several problems in evaluating Chen Duxiu], in Hu Hua, ed., Zbongguo xiandaisbi jiaoxue cankao zihao [Reference materials for teaching and studying about modern Chinese history], no. 1 (Beijing, 1981), p. 47. * Ibid. 10 "Ruhe pingjie Chen Duxiu de gong yu guo?" [How do we evaluate the contributions and faults of Chen Duxiu?], Jiefang junbao [Liberation Army News], Oct. 14, 1979.

8

CHAPTER ONE

in China to advocate proletarian revolution. Indeed, at least one recent study of the May Fourth period has suggested a persistence of Confucian ideas in the literature of the New Culture movement that began in 1915 with Chen's publication of Youth, or New Youth, magazine.11 Although this approach might seem novel, a recent Japanese study by Matsumoto Hideki has gone even further in the same direction. To be sure, Matsumoto, like most Western and Chinese writers, sees Chen as engaged in transforming the spiritual consciousness of Chinese youth by attempting to "elevate European and American ideas of science and de­ mocracy" within China.12 But Matsumoto traces the primary distinctions raised by Chen in carrying out this goal to the ideas of earlier, more traditional Chinese scholars. In partic­ ular, Matsumoto traces Chen's ideas to his youthful associ­ ation with Zhang Binglin, the great Confucian scholar who in the pre-1911 period was a revolutionary associate of Chen Duxiu.13 Although most have taken for granted the radicalism of Chen's ideas, Matsumoto asserts that both Chen and Zhang shared a "scholar-gentry (shi dafu) consciousness" that un­ derlay what he calls the "conservatism" of many of Chen's positions.14 Matsumoto does not really explain why he feels that Chen and Zhang had a "scholar-gentry consciousness" or why he would characterize some of Chen's ideas as con­ servative, but he does suggest that although Chen and Zhang end up on opposite sides during the Republican period, Chen may have derived from Zhang Binglin his notion of a dis­ tinctive Chinese (and European) national consciousness. For although by 1915 Chen Duxiu, like Zhang, clearly felt that Chinese culture needed to be changed, he also felt that culture Κ. I. Golygina, Theory of Elegant Literature in China (Moscow, 1971). This is discussed briefly in E. Stuart Kirby, Russian Studies of China. 12 Matsumoto Hideki, "Shin bunka undo ni sura chin Dokushu no rikyo shiron" [Chen Duxiu's critique of Confucianism during the New Culture movement], Ritsumeikan Bunganku, 299 (May 1970). 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 11

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

9

could be reduced to an inherited set of values, or a "national essence."15 In fact, around the turn of the century, Chen had been part of a movement led by Zhang Binglin and Liu Shipei, another scholar-radical later turned conservative, to restore China's national essence. A number of American writers have lately studied the National Essence movement, seeing it in the decade after the 1911 Revolution as a conservative "countercurrent" to the New Culture movement led by Chen Duxiu.16 What these writers have not noted (nor were they particularly con­ cerned with this issue) is the similar historical footing of Chen Duxiu and the so-called conservative National Essence schol­ ars, against whom Chen turned after 1911. For as Matsumoto points out, even after Chen broke with the members of the National Essence movement, he continued to be influenced by the ideas and values of this movement.17 Many of the positions Chen took during the New Culture movement period were a result of his opposition to the pro­ posals for the establishment of a Confucian religion by the former reform movement leaders Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. As Matsumoto implies, Chen's anti-Confucian rhet­ oric owed much to the attack by National Essence movement leader Zhang Binglin on Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and other members of the so-called Gongyang school that began in the early 1900s.18 Zhang, and then a decade later Chen, vehemently disagreed with Kang's notion that Confucianism was a national religion similar to that of Christianity in the West. This disagreement between Kang and Zhang (which was later joined by Chen Duxiu) was in many ways a continuation of a discussion that had been going on for several centuries between the followers of the so-called New Text movement, represented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 15

Ibid. Charlotte Furth, ed., The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China, pp. 30-31. 17 Matsumoto Hideki, "Shin bunka." 18 Ibid. 16

10

CHAPTER ONE

by Kang Youwei and his followers, and the adherents of the Old Text movement, represented in modern times by Zhang Binglin. The Old Text adherents, who pioneered the kaozheng or evidential method of scholarship, desired to return to what they considered to be the authentic Confucian tradition; in the process they managed to demolish many of the neo-Confucian orthodoxies that had been taken for granted in China since at least the Song dynasty (960-1279). The Old Text adherents were particularly opposed to what they felt to be the metaphysical assumptions of the neo-Confucian doctrine, seeing them as adulterations introduced into Confucian doc­ trine as a consequence of Buddhist influence. Old Text schol­ ars pioneered a more critical and rational view of Confucian tradition as well as rigorous standards of scholarship that may have made it easier for later Chinese to accept Western dem­ ocratic and scientific ideas critical of the traditional Confucian orthodoxy.19 Certainly, the critiques of the Old Text proponents influ­ enced their New Text opponents and vice versa. A shared sense of values was evident in the twentieth century when both sides sometimes joined forces in their opposition to the problems posed for China by Western imperialism. Both Chen Duxiu and Zhang Binglin, for instance, were at one time fol­ lowers of their later enemy Kang Youwei. It is therefore not surprising that in attacking Confucianism, Chen Duxiu often took for granted the definitions of Confucianism put forward by his opponents. As Matsumoto asserts, Chen's later attacks on Confucian ritual as inseparable from the Confucian tra­ dition showed the influence of Liang Qichao, who in his Con­ fucian writings emphasized the stress on rites of Confucius's disciple Xun Zi.20 Matsumoto's demonstration of Chen's indebtedness to Liang Qichao and Zhang Binglin suggests an interesting avenue of inquiry. The writings of Japanese writers such as Matsumoto, along with the ideas of the Soviet historians mentioned above, 19 Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China. 20 Matsumoto Hideki, "Shin bunka."

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

11

provide an important supplement to the works of Western scholars who have recently studied long-ignored conservative Chinese figures such as Zhang Binglin, Liu Shipei, and Liang Shuming.21 Taken together the studies of these recent histo­ rians make it clear that the relationship of Chen Duxiu (and by association the entire New Culture movement) to his tra­ dition and to Western ideas is far more complicated than past historians have suggested. Placed within this context, many of the stereotypes about Chen disappear. Chen was not simply a Westernized intellectual. Contrary to most previous Chinese and Western biographers of Chen, I maintain that during the period in which he edited the journal New Youth, the major focus for the New Culture movement, Chen in fact was an ardent nationalist whose seeming cos­ mopolitanism was skin-deep at best. But Chen opposed those nationalist proposals that he felt would not preserve what he deemed the true essence of the Chinese nation. Similarly, he advocated Western ideas that he felt could help to retain a real Chinese essence. The ideas of "science and democracy," which Chen is often credited with introducing or at least pop­ ularizing in China, were already prevalent by the time that Chen began the New Culture movement. In fact, such notions were originally introduced by the very people Chen attacked in his New Youth writings for having perverted these ideas— Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and their followers. (Attacking people for betraying their own ideals was to become a com­ mon trait in Chinese Communist history.) Chen retained the Old Text movement's antipathy to Kang's proposals for a Confucian religion. Additionally, he felt that Kang's attempt to show the compatibility between Confucianism and "science and democracy" would result in a negation of Western ideas. Like Zhang Binglin and other Old Text scholars, Chen felt 21 Charlotte Furth, "The Sage as Rebel: The Inner World of Chang Pinglin," in The Limits of Change. Also, Martin Bernal, "Liu Shih-p'ei and Na­ tional Essence," in Limits of Change. Also, Laurence Schneider, "National Essence and the New Intelligentsia," in Limits of Change. See also Guy S. Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity.

12

CHAPTER ONE

that the proposals of his opponents, especially Kang Youwei, were incompatible with the true needs and ideals of the Chinese people and nation. But I am not simply writing to show that Chen Duxiu's role in history during the New Culture movement was more com­ plicated than previous writers have suggested. The failure to understand corrrectly Chen Duxiu's role in this movement has in turn led to a basic misunderstanding of the history of the early Chinese Communist party and in a more general sense to a failure to appreciate fully the continuities and disconti­ nuities in modern Chinese history. The debate over continuity has been defined largely by the often misinterpreted works of the late Joseph Levenson. Es­ sentially, Levenson's works can best be understood in terms of his own metaphor of "new wine into old bottles."22 Lev­ enson's point was that the content and intent of twentieth century Chinese political and social reform is so different from that of the traditional society that one has to talk about a radical discontinuity or break in modern Chinese history. No matter what the bottle looks like, the wine is different. This change, in Levenson's opinion, was a result of the impact of Western imperialism. Levenson felt that the difficulties of the Chinese social and political establishment in repelling Western incursions into China forced the Chinese to adopt many of the methods, and subsequently even ideas, of Western society. Unfortunately Levenson's penchant for belittling the attempts of modern Chinese reformers to search for parallels in Chinese and Western history, as well as his fondness for exposing the futility of any effort at salvaging Confucian values that might be compatible with Western ideas, have given many the notion that Levenson virtually denied any Chinese context to modern Chinese history. This misconception has been exacerbated by the Western sensibilities that pervaded Levenson's works; many readers have inferred—quite falsely—that Levenson was gloating that the West had in effect defeated the East.23 22Joseph

Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modem Fate, vols. 1-3. For a good discussion of the pros and cons of Levenson's work, see Maurice Meisner and Rhoads Murphey, eds., The Mozartian Historian: Es­ says on the Works of Joseph R. Levenson. 13

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

13

While a number of recent American historians have tended to see Levenson in this way, at least one Soviet commentator, who is better able to understand Levenson's works than his American counterparts, has suggested that Joseph Levenson (and Maurice Meisner) were among the few "bourgeois" his­ torians who have "been disturbed" by the overly "idealistic" manner in which the history of traditional Chinese society is usually portrayed.24 To be sure, the writer is still critical of Levenson's work, seeing it as another example of Western bourgeois Sinology. Still, Soviet authors would appear to have had no trouble in understanding the basic premise underlying Levenson's works. Levenson began with the assumption that Chinese thinkers were faced with the fact of Western material superiority and the resulting ability of the West to invade China and offer an alternative to the existing political and social elites. Levenson is therefore not implying (and certainly not gloating) that Chinese thought could not stand up in the face of Western ideas. Rather, he is examining the dilemmas faced by the Chinese elite who in Levenson's view were con­ fronted by superior Western military and economic might and felt compelled to seek new ideas to reestablish their own po­ sition and preserve the independence of their country.25 Although Levenson's writings have been misunderstood, they still have dominated the debate over continuities in mod­ ern Chinese history. Much recent scholarship has been de­ voted to showing the persistence of traditional ideas or insti­ tutions in modern China and proving that many Chinese were seriously concerned with problems very similar to those with which Western thinkers are usually identified. But many of these attempts to refute Levenson have forgotten that Levenson himself suggested that it is only the wine and not the bottles that have changed.26 In the rush to refute Levenson, people seem to have ignored the obvious. One of the underlying themes of this study is 24 L. A. Bereznii, A Critique of American Bourgeois Historiography on China: Problems of Social Development in the Nineteenth and Early Twen­ tieth Centuries,p. 8. 2sJoseph 26

Ibid.

Levenson, Confucian China, vol. 1.

14

CHAPTER ONE

that those Chinese most receptive to Western ideas were those who had themselves earlier been drawn to Chinese ideas that were iconoclastic in terms of Chinese tradition and bore much similarity to the Western ideas they were later to advocate. As already mentioned, as a youth Chen Duxiu was very in­ volved with those Confucian iconoclasts of the kaozheng (evidential research) school who, as Benjamin Elman has dem­ onstrated, had begun to repudiate many traditional neo-Confucian ideas well before the arrival of the West.27 Although this background seems startling at first glance for a man to be identified later with Western ideas, it should be obvious that those involved with Western ideas would have been in­ terested earlier in similar Chinese ideas. Yet in spite of the recent search for continuities in Chinese thought, no one has previously bothered to point this out. Still, as this study seeks to show, Chen's iconoclasm would have been a very lonely undertaking had there not been a group of influential people who had reason to support his ideas. It should also not be surprising that many among those at the upper levels of Chinese society were discontented with the official system. Several centuries earlier, the kaozheng movement had originated in the middle of the Qing dynasty among southern merchant families with official connections. By the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, groups such as those which had once backed the kaozheng movement were even more willing to lend support to new heterodox groups. Some members of these groups were involved in specialized, particularistic pursuits that did not always receive what they considered to be adequate recognition from the official gov­ ernment ideology. Others were simply dissatisfied with their own political and social power and perhaps enjoyed experi­ menting with new ideas. The traditional and, later, Western iconoclastic values that Chen advanced (and initially claimed were mutually compatible) were those that appealed to the interests of these groups, with which Chen identified both because of birth and inclination. 27

Elman, From Philosophy to Philology.

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

15

The changes advocated by Chen were those that he felt were necessary for China to meet the challenge of the West. But some of these changes were also beneficial to a substantial portion of the Chinese elite, particularly those legions of clerks, merchants, military men, and others who might not have re­ ceived sufficient credit under the old system. Change, in the form of Western technology and thought, gave to many of these people new tools with which to carry out their jobs more efficiently, while at the same time affirming the importance of those engaged in these specialized particularist concerns. Chen Duxiu began his career, in effect, as a spokesperson for this group. But while his protests and ideology grew out of this tradition, Chen came to oppose the political and social order that most of these people (i.e., the traditional iconoclasts and their merchant and gentry allies) were willing to accept after 1911. Viewed within this context, Chen's New Culture movement ideas can be seen as a repudiation of the ideas of his early associates who now eschewed further change, and his activ­ ities were in many ways an attempt to remind his earlier associates of their previous iconoclasm. Chen's writings were also an attempt to reach a new body of youth, who he hoped would be as iconoclastic as he and his peers had been in their own younger days. Chen's New Youth writings came at a time when his earlier associates—Zhang Binglin, Liu Shipei, and Sun Yuyun, among others—had become fearful of radical political change. Although all these people had been radicals, they were now no longer willing to tinker very much more with the traditional political and social structure. To counter these former associates, Chen attempted to appeal to the new generation of students during the 1915 to 1919 period. The failure to understand properly that Chen's appeals to this new student group were influenced by his relations with his former radical associates has clouded our understanding of the problem of continuity in modern Chinese history. It has also created misconceptions in understanding the devel­ opment of the Chinese Communist party, particularly Chen's role in the establishment of that party. To be sure, there has

16

CHAPTER ONE

been little agreement on Chen's place in the early history of the party. He has been considered so controversial by most Chinese and even by some Western scholars that his accom­ plishments in founding the party have sometimes been ignored or slighted. Among Western historians, the majority view has once again taken its cue largely from the pioneering writings of Benjamin Schwartz.28 Schwartz has concluded that Chen Duxiu turned to Marxism because of his disappointment with the Western powers' betrayal of China's interests at the Paris Peace Con­ ference of 1919, when German rights in China's Shandong province were transferred to the Japanese. Looking for an alternative to Western democratic ideas, Chen was attracted by the message of "scientific" socialism that pervaded Marxist doctrine. The idea of a scientific solution to society's problems combined with the message of economic development that emanated from the Bolshevik Revolution gave Chen and his comrades, in Schwartz's view, hope for a prescription to the woes of Chinese society.29 This is a view of Chen as a cos­ mopolitan with a great deal of belief in foreign, especially Western, ideas and methods. Schwartz has theorized that it was Chen's faith in foreign powers that made him ultimately willing to yield to Comintern discipline and allow himself to be manipulated by his Soviet advisers who wanted the infant CCP to conclude a United Front in 1923 with the Guomindang (KMT), the party of Sun Yatsen and Jiang Kaishek. When the United Front collapsed in 1927, Chen was made its scapegoat. Still, Schwartz's view credits Chen with more independence of thought than does the view of Guomindang writers who, although somewhat sympathetic to Chen's account of how he was vilified by the Comintern after 1927, still see Chen as a tool of the Russians. Few Guomindang historians, when writ­ ing about Chen Duxiu's Communist activities, have not men­ tioned—or more often, quoted from—the report delivered to Sun Yatsen in November of 1923 in which eleven right-wing 28 Benjamin Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, esp. chaps. 1-3. 29 Ibid.

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

17

KMT members opposed to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) admission into the KMT charged that Chen Duxiu was leading a Russian-organized effort to subvert the KMT and to take over the leadership in that organization.30 Chinese Communist historians seem to take the opposite point of view from their Guomindang counterparts. Until re­ cently, they have felt that Chen's problem was that he failed to heed Comintern advice. But this, in the view of Communist writers, was not as a result of Chen's independence of thought. Some, as already mentioned, have felt that Chen was simply an agent of the KMT;31 in the thirties, Communist writers even accused Chen of being a Japanese spy.32 Most Com­ munist historians, however, have felt that Chen was simply enamored with Western bourgeois ideas, so much so that he refused to abandon the alliance with the Guomindang long after it had stopped serving any purpose. The orthodox line on Chen has followed fairly closely the accusations made against him in 1931 by Cai Hesen, who blamed Chen for allowing the KMT to assume the leadership in the national revolution, for neglecting the proletariat, and in particular for slighting the peasantry, whom Cai felt Chen regarded as "reactionary" and "superstitious."33 Lately, as the ideological climate in China has changed, Chinese Communist historians have moved closer to the view of their Guomindang and American counterparts. Recent ar­ ticles have suggested that many of the problems of the United Front for which Chen has been blamed were a result of Com­ intern errors.34 This position thus implicitly concedes that the 30 Zhongguo guomindang zhongyang jiancha weiyuan hui [Chinese Guomindang Central Control Commission], Danhe gongchandang liangda yaoan [Two important documents impeaching the Chinese Communist party]. 31 For a discussion of this, see Lin Maosheng, "Dui Chen Duxiu." 32 This is discussed in chapter 7. 33 Cai Hesen, "Dang de jihui zhuyi shi" [The history of party opportunism], in Chtse dangan [Red documents], ed. Li Minhun (Beijing, 1928). 34 Lin Maosheng, "Dui Chen Duxiu"; idem, "Guanyu Chen Duxiu." See also Wang Yongchun and Chen Jiaxia, "Chen Duxiu zai guogong hezuo wenti shang de sixiang bianhua"[The transformations in Chen Duxiu's thoughts

18

CHAPTER ONE

Comintern had a major roie in the early history of the party. But it does not get Chen Duxiu off the hook—it still views him as overly enamored, or at least too trusting, of the Rus­ sians. The Russians, not surprisingly, are also unwilling to let Chen off the hook. Most Russian authors still tend to follow the orthodox line on Chen that came out of the 1929 con­ ference on "Chen Duxiuism" held in the Soviet Union in order to defend the Stalinist position on the failure in 1927 of the first CCP-KMT United Front. At this conference, Chen was said to have taken a "Menshevik" road as regards the Chinese revolution.35 In particular, he was accused of having refused to carry out the policy of agrarian revolution after 1925. At this meeting, the former Comintern agent to China, Borodin, went even further, maintaining that Chen Duxiu and the Shanghai leadership of the party had since 1923 pursued a policy that ignored the agrarian revolution, believing that the major issue facing the country was that of imperialism.36 I will argue in this book that this view of Chen as one who opposed the agrarian revolution is in general an unfair one, but it is the view that has prevailed in China and in the Soviet Union since the late 1920s. Ironically, Borodin's attempt— circumspect as it was—to show a fundamental disagreement between the part of the party he controlled and that over which Chen Duxiu maintained dominance was ignored and attacked, although I will argue here that there was some sub­ stance to Borodin's charges in this regard. Recently a new view of the Chinese revolution has also surfaced in the Soviet Union, implying that Chen has been on the question of cooperation between the Communists and the National­ ists]. Dangshi yatijiu S (Oct. 28, 1980). Also Tao Kangle, "Dui Chen Duxiu youqing jihui zhuyi luxian xingcheng de yidian renzhi" [A little understanding of the circumstances behind Chen Duxiu's right-wing opportunism], Dangshi yanjiu 5 (Oct. 28, 1980): 31-37. 35 The principal spokesman for this position was Pavel Mif. For a discussion of this conference see Dan Jacobs, Borodin: Stalin's Man in China, pp. 306— 12. 36 Ibid. See also Lydia Holubnychy, Michael Borodin and the Chinese Rev­ olution, 1923-1925, pp. 319-20.

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

19

guilty of leftist, not rightist, errors.37 This view, which seeks to explain Chen's later Trotskyist activities and also to trace the problems of Maoism back through the early history of the party, has attempted to explain Chen's problem as a result of his belief in the possibility of an immediate socialist rev­ olution for China without the necessity of a bourgeois stage to the revolution. It is as a consequence of his belief in the possibility of telescoping the revolution that Chen is said to have refused to consider alliances with the peasantry or any group other than the urban proletariat. Whatever other problems it might have, this theory does consider Chen as an independent revolutionary theorist. In this it departs from all other interpretations of Chen; as dif­ ferent as the various interpretations of Chen are, they all share in common a tendency to perceive him as foolishly romantic in terms of his perception of the Chinese revolution and as overly infatuated with Western or at least foreign theories and ideas. One of the points of this study is that this image of Chen does not hold up under close scrutiny. This is not to say that the ideas of all previous writers on Chen have been completely incorrect, but that they have been derived in no small part from a misconception of Chen's role in the New Culture movement. Once it becomes clear that Chen was not simply an unthinking believer in Western solutions and ideas for China, it becomes easier to examine the murky ground surrounding Chen's decision to become a Marxist. As I will demonstrate, Chen's Marxist ideas did not develop as suddenly as most have previously insisted. Like many tra­ ditional Chinese intellectuals—particularly those conservative liberals like Liang Qichao, Dai Jitao, and others—who had influenced him since 1915, Chen was captivated by socialism in the postwar period, seeing it as an alternative to capitalism that could utilize some of the existing Chinese social structure; 37 "Novye materialy of pervom s'ezde Kommunisticheskoi Partii Kitaia" [New Materials on the First Congress of the Communist Party of China], Norody Azii i Afriki [Peoples of Asia and Africa] 6 (1972): 150-58. Although this article does not by itself seem all that suggestive, it created a great amount of discussion when I was in China in 1980-81.

20

CHAPTER ONE

Chen and his colleagues had been developing this point with regard to socialism since the early 1900s. Unlike his more conservative colleagues, however, Chen was willing to break with traditional political institutions to implement these ideas. Thus Chen, alone among his colleagues, willingly accepted Comintern aid in developing the first Chinese Communist party. Chen did not accept this aid because of a simple naive faith in Soviet or Western solutions, as has sometimes been implied. Rather, Chen was aware of the very real help that the Com­ intern could give him and of the need to direct the Chinese radical youth—to whose needs he was always very sensitive— who were already breaking with the social and political in­ stitutions of the past. And in spite of his deep suspicions of Soviet intentions, Chen found himself enmeshed in the web of mechanisms created by the Soviet technicians who offered to help Chen in the construction of the party and in the in­ creasing hostility of a youth movement that had a propensity to turn on leaders who appeared to falter or compromise. The traditional relationship that Chen had formed with his student followers in the years prior to 1922 did not serve very well once he and his followers were enveloped by the party or­ ganization, a lesson future Chinese leaders also were to learn. When Chen finally turned to the formation of a Trotskyist group, it was not (as again almost all writers on Chen have implied), as a desperate reaction to his own expulsion from the party he had created. Having been disavowed by the Com­ intern, Chen did not simple-mindedly feel that he needed a new foreign inspiration. Rather, he had on his own begun to develop many ideas similar to those of Trotsky. Moreover, Chen also desired to continue his relationship with the urban intellectual youth he had once led so well. In the process, he was to articulate some of the complaints harbored by leftist intellectuals against the official party since that time. Chen's Trotskyist followers were the inheritors of the legacy of these urban intellectuals with whom Chen had been working since the early 1900s and who contributed so many ideas to the formation of dissent within the Chinese Communist party.

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

21

In the end Chen, like Trotsky, found himself misunderstood and denigrated by the very group he had helped found. But both men left a towering legacy in their respective countries. In a way, it is Chen's legacy that is the greater. If it is rare enough to find an individual who is able to supplant the values with which he was raised and to have an effect on changing the traditional values of his society, it is even rarer that a person is able to have an impact on more than one field, as did Chen Duxiu, who influenced not only the political but also the cultural and intellectual life of modern Chinese so­ ciety. The scope of Chen's influence is all the more impressive when one notes that, practically alone among his contem­ poraries, Chen was a major figure through three separate pe­ riods of modern Chinese history: the pre-1911 Republican revolutionary period, the period of the May Fourth move­ ment, and the period of the early history of the Chinese Com­ munist party. That one person could have such a great impact over such a broad historical field says much about the China of the early 1900s. It was probably only in China—and certainly not in the Russia of Trotsky—that one person could still have so much influence over both culture and politics. A division be­ tween culture and politics had not yet occurred in early twen­ tieth-century Chinese society. In fact, the traditional associ­ ation of intellectual and political activities in China led to a situation in which cultural concerns were expected of those involved in politics, so that the two were even more closely connected than in other premodern societies. This close connection between culture and politics explains why Chen's cultural innovations gave him such great political influence over Chinese student youth. Bred to believe that they had a unique role to play in Chinese society and suddenly released from many of the fetters of their past, Chinese youth have proved to be the moving force in all the major changes that have occurred in Chinese society in the twentieth century. Chen was the chief theoretician and leader of this youth rev­ olution in China in the earlier part of this century. Just as he was able to draw on the roots of traditional Chinese icono-

22

CHAPTER ONE

clasm to legitimize his break with traditional Chinese ideas, so was he able to utilize the traditional roots of his influence among the youth to lead them in a radically new direction. Taking advantage of the political respect traditionally given to cultural leaders, Chen infused these youth with a new sense of mission and purpose in transforming Chinese society, even­ tually leading them to communism. Even after he left the party, Chen continued to excite a small minority of party youth with demands for democratic reforms within the party and for the independence of artistic and literary activities. He in effect defined a special place for Chinese youth in the Marx­ ist ideas he brought to China.

CHAPTER TWO

AWAKENING YOUTH

Chen Duxiu's life has always been clouded by an air of mystery, further thickened by constant rumor. This is partly to be expected in a man whose attitudes to the past were so ambivalent and paradoxical and who exhibited an extreme reluctance to discuss his private affairs even with his friends. In his later years, however, Chen decided to overcome this reticence and begin writing an autobiography with the idea of illustrating for others, through the story of his own struggle, the amount of effort necessary among members of his gen­ eration to overcome the weight of the past.1 But even in this document, which was never completed, Chen Duxiu confesses that he remembers little about his child­ hood and family and does not care to question friends and 1 Chen Duxiu, Shiatt zizhuan [Chen Duxiu's autobiography], pp. 23-47. This has been translated by Richard Kagan, China Quarterly, 50 (April-June 1972): 301-14. The autobiography was written in mid-1937 while Chen was in prison. It was first published in the Yuzhou feng [Universal Wind]. Al­ though the original plan was to write the story of Chen Duxiu's life through the May Fourth period, his writing was interrupted when he was unexpectedly let out of jail as a result of the establishment of the Second United Front between the KMT and the CCP. For the story of the writing of the auto­ biography, see Feng De, "Guanyu shian zizhuan" [Regarding Chen Duxiu's autobiography], Gujin [Old and New] 6 (Feb. 20, 1942). Zheng Xuejia has claimed that Chen wrote more than the two chapters that were published. But during extensive interviews in China in 1980-81 with people who have been doing research on Chen Duxiu or were close to Chen before his death, I turned up no one who had any knowledge of these extra chapters. This reconfirms what Tai Jingnong told me in an interview in Taipei in January 1975. Tai, who was close to Chen before he died, said that he did not believe that Chen had written any more of the autobiography than was published. For Zheng Xuejia's version of the story, see "Ban xin qingnian qian Chen Duxiu shenghuo de pianduan" [Fragments of Chen Duxiu's life prior to the publishing of New Youth], in Zhonggong xingwang shi [The history of the rise and fall of the Chinese Communist party], vol. 2, p. 764.

24

CHAPTER TWO

relatives in an effort to freshen his memory. Instead, he has decided to concentrate only on those events that have left a deep impression on him. "FATHERLESS CHILD"

The first of these recollections is that he was a "fatherless child" educated by an overly strict grandfather.2 In his au­ tobiography, Chen stresses that his father died when Chen was only a few months old (a loss repeated, coincidentally, in the early lives of almost every other future leader of the May Fourth movement),3 and that since he never really knew his father at all, his iconoclastic revolt against Chinese tra­ dition could in no way have been a revolt against his father, as claimed by some of his contemporaries.4 But Chen was hardly the lonely orphan of humble origin that he portrayed himself to be in his autobiography. Chen's father, who had been a minor official and a tutor to a wealthy family in Suzhou, died when Chen was actually two years— not two months—old,5 after which Chen was adopted by his paternal uncle,6 whose beneficent influence offset the harsh­ ness of Chen's grandfather-teacher, who died when Chen was 2 Chen

Duxiu, Shian zizhuan, p. 24. Lu Xun, Li Dazhao, Ba Jin, and Fu Sinian are just a few of the people to whom this description applies. 4 Chen Duxiu, Sbian zizhuan, pp. 24-25. 5 "Chen Yanzhong xiansheng zhuan" [A biography of Mr. Chen Yanzhong], as excerpted from the family genealogy and carried in Anqing shi lishi xuehui [Anqing municipal historical committee] and Anqingshi tushuguan [Anqing municipal library], joint eds., Chen Duxiu yanjiu cankao ziliao [Research materials on Chen Duxiu], vol. 1, pp. 63—64. Also "Chen Yanzhong zhuan" [Biography of Chen Yanzhong], excerpted from the Huaining District Gazette in ibid., p. 65. Also Zhang Dong, Xie Xunsheng, and Shi Dunnan, "Chen Duxiu jiashi gaolue" [A brief study of Chen Duxiu's family history], in ibid. 6 "Fangwen Chen Songnian tanhua jilu" [Record of an interview with Chen Songnian], May 25-26, 1979, draft prepared in manuscript form, confirmed and signed by Chen Songnian. This information has also been noted by a number of other sources, including almost all of Chen's family and close friends. I first became aware of it in January 1975, after an interview with Tai Jingnong. 3

AWAKENING YOUTH

25

ten. Chen's uncle had no children of his own, and he and his wife were very close to Chen and his older brother and were to remain so until their deaths—the uncle, Chen Xifan, passing away in 1913, his wife surviving until the late 1930s. More­ over, Chen's uncle was a powerful official who managed to accumulate a considerable amount of wealth during his tenure in office.7 To be sure, in not mentioning his adopted father, Chen may have been attempting to keep a pledge he made to his uncle in the early 1900s, when his uncle pretended to have Chen's name removed from the family genealogy as a result of the nephew's revolutionary activities. Chen thereafter publicly in­ sisted that he no longer had anything to do with the family businesses, though this was merely a front designed to prevent the government from meddling with the family fortune in revenge against Chen Duxiu's antigovernment activities.8 In spite of this ruse, much of Chen's uncle's fortune was plun­ dered by government troops who raided the family house in 1913 and 1927 in Anqing,9 the capital of Anhui at that time, because of Chen's radical involvements. In writing his auto­ biography, Chen may have been reluctant to jeopardize fur­ ther the finances of his stepmother and his children; one of his sons was at that time attending college in Beijing, his education being financed by the income from the family an­ tique shop in that city.10 Still, in describing himself as a lonely orphan raised until 7 "Chen Xiawen tan Chen Duxiu" [Chen Xiawen discusses Chen Duxiu], as interviewed by Chen Songnian, Zhang Dong, and Wen Fengyan in Chen Duxiu yanjiu cankao ziliao, 1: 92-95. See also "Zaifang Chen Songnian tanhua jilu" [Another record of an interview with Chen Songnian], November 1979, in Anhui gemingshi yanjiu ziliao [Materials on the history of the rev­ olution in Anhui], vol. 1, ed. Anhuisheng shehui kexuesuo lishi yanshi [Anhui provincial social science group historical research bureau], pp. 9-10. Finally, see "Guanyu jiachan xingbai de huiyi" [Recalling the rise and fall of the family fortune], draft of an interview with Chen Songnian from July 29, 1980. 8 ZhangJun et al., "Chen Duxiu jiashi gaolue," p. 192. 9 Ibid. See also Chen Xiawen, "Chen Xiawen tan Chen Duxiu." Also Chen Songnian, "Zaifang Chen Songnian tanhua jilu." 10 Chen Songnian, "Guanyu jiachan xingbai de huiyi."

26

CHAPTER TWO

he was ten by an opium-smoking, tyrannical grandfather, Chen was probably also attempting to maintain his public image as a dedicated revolutionary rather than as the rich scion of an official family. The grandfather Chen described in his auto­ biography bore a striking resemblance to the grandfather in Ba Jin's The Family (Jia), a novel that became a classic for the Chinese youth in the 1920s and 1930s who were in re­ bellion against the ethos of the old society.11 In both works, the grandfathers' corrupt hypocritical moralism seems to ex­ emplify the problems of the old Confucian order. Even if Chen's grandfather, who appeared to his contemporaries to be a cultured and learned man, was indeed as fierce as Chen portrayed him to be, still we must ask why Chen chose to write about him at such length in his autobiography. One likely explanation is that Chen, as we will see, was obsessed with maintaining the loyalty and admiration of a youthful radical audience; his descriptions of the meanness of his grand­ father played to the antipatriarchal passions of that audience. (At almost the same time Mao Zedong, who was similarly interested in gaining a loyal following among Chinese youth, was dictating an autobiography in which he depicted himself as the rebellious victim of a tyrannical father.)12 Most of those who embraced this antifeudalism were them­ selves strongly influenced by the values of their own family, and Chen was no exception. In spite of Chen's self-description as an opponent of the traditional ideals of his family, there are hints that his family was very important in helping to shape his lifelong attitudes toward both the West and the Chinese official class. His genealogy13—his father and grand­ father were teachers and minor officials, another uncle had been a minor official, and before then his ancestors had been mostly peasants—suggests an up-and-coming family who had improved its standing through hard work and enterprise, not through official connections. The local annals confirm that 11 For a discussion of this, see Olga Lang, Pa Chin and His Writings: Chinese Youth Between Two Generations. 12 Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, pp. 121-34. 13 Zhang Dong et al., "Chen Duxiu jiashi gaolue."

AWAKENING YOUTH

27

Chen's uncle was an unpretentious man with a common touch.14 A juren of relatively humble origin, the uncle rose to be the chief magistrate of Liangyang zhou or region.15 (Today this area encompasses much of Liaoning province, including the city of Shengyang.) This rapid rise on the part of someone with such an undistinguished background suggests a master of administrative and personal details. One would expect that Chen's uncle would also have a certain disdain for those in the upper-level scholar-gentry class who depended on his prac­ tical knowledge to maintain their power; these were the same elites Chen would attack so vehemently throughout his career. Certainly Chen's uncle was quick to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the West to enhance the family fortune; his wealth is said to have increased greatly during the Russo-Japanese War, when he was lucky enough to be the head of a district in Manchuria where taxes were being collected on horses transshipped from Mongolia for sale to the belligerents. The family fortune had already grown shortly before this time, when a British firm in Beijing supplied Chen's uncle with the capital to set up an exclusive soybean pur­ chasing center in his district; the soybeans purchased under this monopolistic arrangement were in turn sold to the British company in Beijing for a fixed price. The Chen family fortune suffered a small disaster in 1913 when a British company set up a second soybean purchasing center in the same district, destroying the monopoly the uncle had had over the price in the area and making it impossible for him to deliver the beans to Beijing at the price promised.16 Of course none of these details about Chen's uncle found its way into his autobiography. It is understandable that Chen, who recorded his life story while he was in jail for his Com­ munist and Trotskyist activities, would not want the facts 14 Ibid. Also, "Chen Xifan xiansheng zhuan" [A biography of Mr. Chen Xifan], excerpted from the Huaining District Gazette in Chen Duxiu yanjiu cankao ziliao, vol. 1, pp. 62-63. 15 Ibid. 16 Chen Songnian, "Zaifang Chen Songnian tanhua jilu." Also Chen Songnian, "Guanyu jiachan xingbai de huiyi."

28

CHAPTER TWO

about the family business to be known to his readers. More­ over, the traditional Confucian bias against mercantile activ­ ities might have made Chen even more reluctant to discuss his uncle's dealings. It is nonetheless interesting to continue to speculate on the extent of the influence of this family back­ ground upon Chen. For example, every comprador, while admiring the techniques of his Western partner, also resented the way he was being used and felt that if he were freed of governmental restraints and imperialist oppression, he could manage all the affairs single-handedly at a better profit for himself and his family. Chen Duxiu, throughout much of the first forty years of his life, reflected this belief, insisting that tremendous rewards awaited the Chinese if they could adopt Western methods without the restraining influence of either their autocratic government or imperialism. But Chen also reacted against much of what he was exposed to in his family surroundings. Throughout his life he com­ plained about how the Chinese traditional culture encouraged officials to enhance their own family fortune rather than think of the public benefit. He particularly denounced those Chinese who allowed themselves to be tools of foreign business inter­ ests. STUDENT OF TRADITION

More important than Chen's family background on the formation of his later character was the cultural and intellec­ tual milieu to which he was exposed at an early age. As Chen relates in his autobiography, he was immersed in the Con­ fucian classics while he was young. He never mentions the specific schools of Han or Song learning that he studied, but he does state that very early in life he became bored with the official Eight-Legged essay style and preferred to read the Zhaoming wenxuan, a sixth-century collection of parallel verse containing many obscure characters. Chen's study of these characters hints at an early interest in the ideas of the kaozheng, or evidential research movement, whose proponents had undermined much of the orthodox neo-Confucian Song

AWAKENING YOUTH

29

learning school. He also mentions reading the works of Yuan Mei, the eccentric eighteenth-century poet, who was an elo­ quent advocate of women's rights, particularly of women's literature, a critic of the examination system, and a proponent of writing that freely expressed emotion. By mentioning these topics, Chen was signaling to his Chinese readers his early identification with iconoclastic elements within Chinese tra­ dition. He does not explain his interest in these works in any great detail, but he does attempt to excuse his later success in the civil service examination by implying that his knowledge of obscure characters confused the ignorant examiners. In reality, Chen, like many of those who had begun to experiment with traditional iconoclastic ideas, was also an apt student of the official culture—which may account for the vehemence with which he opposed it later. Chen passed his xiucai, or the first level of the Confucian civil service exam­ ination, in 1896 at the precocious age of 17, ranking as the number-one candidate in his district.17 He was not as suc­ cessful at the imperial examination in 1897, when he sat for his juren, or the second level of the civil service exam, an event described vividly in his autobiography. To compete in this higher-level examination Chen traveled with his brother, Chen Mengji, his brother's tutor, and several other students to Nanjing, where the biennial test was held. Chen was the only member of his group who had not com­ peted in the previous provincial examinations, and as he ap­ proached the Nanjing city wall for the first time, riding on the back of a donkey, his heart soared. The gigantic phoenix gate on the outside of the city was considerably bigger than were the city gates of his hometown in Anqing, and he imag­ ined that the buildings and the street markets of the city would be dazzlingly beautiful. But he was disappointed; the city was as dirty and run-down as the provincial capital he had left behind in Anhui. "The levelness and width of the big streets in the northern section were heavenly compared with those of Anqing's . . . nevertheless, the buildings were just as small 17

Chen Duxiu, Shian ztzbuan, p. 34.

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and cracked as Anqing's. The slums in the northern part of town matched Anqing's just like a brother. Nanjing's special character was only that it was big. . . ."18 If the city was not exactly as Chen may have envisioned it, the often crude behavior of Chen's fellow students was even more of an eye-opener. Under the tension of waiting for the exams and in the companionship of the moment, many of the students indulged in constant whoring and pranks. The mer­ chants and shopkeepers of the city had no way to protect their shops against thefts or their daughters against seduction by these exalted members of the "intelligentsia." Any affront would stir the candidates up into a melee. Passing students, whether they knew the others or not, would rush to help. The merchants knew that the real reason that the candidates came forward was not to help in the battle but to steal as much as they could in the confusion. Even if they were informed of the theft by the merchant, the officials couldn't do anything about the many and influential candidates.19 Fortunately, the opportunities afforded by the congregation of so many young students were not purely libidinal but in­ tellectual as well, allowing for the exchange of new ideas and attitudes. Because they allowed large numbers of young mem­ bers of the gentry class to assemble for several months at a time, the examinations had traditionally served as sounding boards for the gentry class.20 The 1897 exam in which Chen participated was politically a very significant one, coming as it did on the heels of China's humiliating defeat by Japan under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki signed in April of 1895. Reform groups of examination candidates under the leadership of Kang Youwei and other liberal gentry leaders had already begun to petition the capital for changes in the 18

Chen Duxiu, Sbian zizhuan, p. 37. p. 39. 20 Kang Youwei, for instance, first came to the attention of the central government in 1895 when he got over a thousand signatures on a petition against the Treaty of Shimonoseki. 19 Ibid.,

AWAKENING YOUTH

31

traditional Chinese political system. The movement, which was then right on the verge of its short-lived political success known as the Hundred Days of Reform, was centered in the main coastal and Yangzi River towns. Consequently, Nanjing was a hotbed of reformist organizations and newspapers.21 One can imagine Chen, alienated by the crudities of the older students and the new living conditions to which he was ex­ posed, eagerly listening to discussions of Western concepts and devouring news of the foreign world. When it finally came time for the examination, an event far more grueling than Chen had imagined even in his most dreary moments, these new ideas took on added significance for Chen. Short of stature and frequently sickly, the eighteen-year-old boy wearily lugged "an examination basket, books, writing materials, food and provisions, the cooking stove, and an oil cloth" through the mob of students into the narrow little stalls where the candidates lived during the nine days of testing. Terrified and nearly overwhelmed by the crowd, Chen was saved from being crushed only through the aid of his elder brother. Inside, where he would have to sleep sitting on the board that was to be his writing table, cobwebs and soot covered the place so liberally that it was difficult to sweep it clean. In the hot summer air, the cooking stoves of the students "turned the long passageway into a fire alley." For Chen, who knew nothing about cooking, there was nothing to eat "but half-cooked, or overcooked, or globbed noodles" during the nine days of the three examinations.22 Even worse was the fate of the other students. Since there were no toilets, the students merely used any available empty room to relieve themselves. When the rooms were reassigned during the sec­ ond examination, some were forced "to endure a terrible stink for three days."23 Conditioned by the iconoclastic authors he had been read21

See H. B. Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, vol. 3, pp. 128-33. 22 Chen Duxiu, Shian zizhuan, pp. 41—42; (translation adapted from Kagan, Chen Duxiu's Autobiography, pp. 313-14). 23 Ibid.

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ing on his own, Chen now found the system unbearable. He began to "question the whole phenomenon of selecting men of talent by the examination system. It was just like an animal exhibition of monkeys and bears performing every few years."24 In this negative mood (Chen may have been further dis­ couraged because he failed his juren examination, though he never states so explicitly in his autobiography), Chen Duxiu was attracted to a new kind of iconoclasm, the writings of the reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao in publications such as Chinese Progress (Shihwu bao), which he now dis­ covered. Later Chen was to relate on several occasions that it was only after reading the works of Kang Youwei that he learned for the first time that not everyone who studied West­ ern learning was a "slave to the foreign devil."25 For Kang showed Chen that Western learning could be as respectable as the iconoclastic Chinese studies he had coveted earlier. Heady with these ideas, Chen resolved to join the reformist group of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. He collected some of his ideas of this period in a pamphlet he published in Anqing shortly after returning from the 1897 examination. Entitled An Account of the Topography of the Yangzi River (Yangzi jiang xingshi lunlue), the article is a detailed geography of the Yangzi "based on old travel books as well as the descriptions of foreigners."26 The pamphlet details the points at which the Yangzi could and should be defended to protect the area from foreign incursion. It discusses where military units should be stationed, how guns should be positioned, and the kinds of naval vessels that could come up the river. The book is at first glance a surprising document, quite unlike all of Chen Duxiu's later writings. But members of the 24 Ibid.,

p. 42; Kagan, Chen Duxiu's Autobiography, p. 314. Duxiu, "Bo Kang Youwei zhi zongtong zongli shu" [Refuting Kang Youwei's petition to the President and the Premier], Xin Qingnian [New Youth}, vol, 2, no. 2 (Oct. 1, 1916). See also "Kongzi zhidao yu xiandai shenghuo" [The Confucian way and present-day Life], Xin Qingnian, vol. 2, no. 4 (Dec. 1, 1916). 26 Chen Duxiu, Yangzi jiang xingshi lunlue [An account of the topography of the Yangzi River] (Anqing, 1897; reprinted in Chen Duxiu yanjiu cankao ziliao), pp. 169-80. 23 Chen

AWAKENING YOUTH

33

school of Han learning, such as the early nineteenth-century scholar and founder of the Guangzhou naval academy Ruan Yuan, had long been interested in problems of naval defense and geography.27 Having learned about the growing foreign invasion of the country as well as about Western ideas during his stay in Nanjing, Chen was naturally interested in foreign accounts of China as well as the writings of those Chinese who had already begun to make studies of practical ways of defending and arming the country. Couched in very polite terms, the document shows evidence of Chen's later stylistic brilliance and his already virulent nationalism. The piece ends by calling on the government to take action "to avoid the ruin of our nation" and imploring the people to "care about the fate of our country."28 Perhaps these words—so mild in retrospect but clearly iden­ tifying Chen as part of the movement for reform that swept the youthful gentry examination candidates—created the shock felt among the local gentry of this town when Chen became a member of the Kang-Liang group. Chen says nothing about the reaction of his own family.29 It may be that his uncle, who was then probably beginning his dealings with his British part­ ners, thought that it would not hurt the boy to learn about the practical techniques of the West. It is more likely that the uncle, while not discouraging Chen from learning more about the West, also persuaded him to abandon temporarily his reform efforts and pursue his examination studies. Although in his autobiography Chen claims to have broken off his ex­ amination studies after sitting for his juren examination in Nanjing,30 in fact after 1897 he followed his uncle to Man­ churia, where the latter personally undertook to tutor Chen.31 Chen was therefore not in Anhui in 1898 when Kang and his followers succeeded in coming to power temporarily in the ill-fated Hundred Days of Reform. 27

Elman, From Philosophy to Philology. Chen Duxiu, Yangzi pang xingshi lunlue. 29 Chen Duxiu, Shian zizhuan. 30 Ibid. 31 Chen Songnian, "Fangwen Chen Songnian tanhua jilu." 28

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COMING OF AGE

Certainly Chen's reformist activities did not do too much harm to his reputation. In 1896 or 1897 his uncle was able to arrange a high-status marriage for him to a woman named Gao Xiaomen, whose father, a former classmate of Chen's uncle, was the military prefect of Anqing and even wealthier and more powerful than the uncle.32 The marriage was not a particularly happy one. Chen's wife was a very traditional woman who rarely set foot outside her house and had little sympathy for Chen's radical ideas—the opposite, incidentally, of her younger, college-educated, Western-dressed half-sister, with whom Chen would later have a long-lasting liaison.33 In 1902, when Chen wanted to go to Japan to study for the first time, his wife refused to part with some of her gold bracelets to finance his trip.34 These experiences with his wife may have confirmed for Chen the value of education for women, although this idea was not new. Education for women had been proposed by many former iconoclastic Chinese writers such as the poet Yuan Mei,35 whose writings had interested Chen during his examination studies.36 The famous sixteenth-century philos­ opher Li Zhi had argued that widows should have the privilege to remarry and that women should have the right to choose their own marital partners.37 And one of the most vociferous advocates of women's rights was the early eighteenth-century Anhui novelist WuJingzi.38 In more modern times, Kang Youwei found justification for his ideas on women from both 32 Ma Qirong and San Yijiao, "Guanyu Chen Duxiu yinqin de xie qingkuang" [A few circumstances according to Chen Duxiu's relatives], draft of a series of interviews conducted in August 1980 in Beijing. 33 "Chen Duxiu de sanwei furen" [Chen Duxiu's three wives], in Chen Duxiu yanjiu cankao ziliao, vol. 1, p. 94. 34 Zhang Dong et al., "Chen Duxiu jiashi gaolue," p. 194. 35 Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet, Stanford, 1957. Also Paul Ropp, Dissent in Early Modern China (Ann Arbor, 1981), esp. chap. 4. 36 Chen Duxiu, Shian zizbuan. 37 Ropp, Dissent, esp. chap. 4. 38 Ibid., esp. pts. 2 and 3.

AWAKENING YOUTH

35

traditional and Western sources.39 The topic is an excellent example of how ideas to which Chen was exposed early merged with Western notions to reinforce his own personal experi­ ences—in this case the difficulties he encountered in his mar­ riage. Chen would soon learn more about both Chinese and West­ ern iconoclastic values. In 1899 he returned from Manchuria to Anqing to attend the funeral of his natural mother.40 It is said that Chen then went to Hangzhou, near Shanghai, in 190041 (another source claims, however, that Chen may in­ stead have returned to Manchuria, staying there until 1902)42 to become a student at the Chiushi Academy, the first insti­ tution to teach Western as well as traditional subjects in the southern Yangzi Valley region 43 The radical scholar Zhang Binglin had taught at the school before Chen arrived, and his influence still lingered. The academy's emphasis on icono­ clastic interpretations of Chinese tradition as well as on West­ ern ideas proved to be a combination of tremendous appeal to Chen Duxiu. His decision to attend this school also meant 39 Lawrence Thompson, "Ta-t'ung Shu and the Communist Manifesto," in Jung-pang Lo, K'ang Yu-wei: A Biography and A Symposium (Tucson, 1967). 40 Chen Duxiu, "Shuai" [An expression of my grief], Jiayin zazhi, vol. 1, no. 5 (May 10, 1915). 41 Most writers on Chen Duxiu's life have claimed that he entered the Chiushi Academy in 1897 or 1898. This is apparently based on a statement in Julie Lien-ying How's dissertation to the effect that Chen entered the Chiushi Academy after he failed his examination; see Julie Lien-ying How, "The Development of Ch'en Tu-hsiu's Thought, 1915-1938" (Master's the­ sis, Columbia Univ., 1949), p. 42. This does not agree with what Chen Duxiu mentioned of his own activities in the poem "Shuai," ibid. Moreover, the revolutionary tide at this school with which Chen Duxiu usually is associated did not begin until 1901. See Mary Backus Rankin, Early Chinese Revolu­ tionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902-1911, pp. 140—43. 42 Li Fanqun, ed., "Chen Duxiu nianbiao buzheng" [A correction of Chen Duxiu's yearly chronology], in Chen Duxiu yanjiu cankao ziliao, vol. 1, p. 225. Working off the same material that I have already quoted, the author of this work has decided that Chen Duxiu went to Hangzhou in 1897 and then the following year joined his uncle in Manchuria. 43 See note 41.

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a final break with his examination studies. While at the school, Chen is said to have enrolled in a naval architecture program, probably to continue the studies that had led to the publication of his 1897 pamphlet, "An Account of the Topography of the Yangzi River."44 The Chiushi Academy became one of the centers of the new Chinese student culture. The name chiushi (search for the truth) was a familiar slogan of the kaozbeng movement and the school was evidently established in the tradition of the radical kaozheng academies that had flourished in the area during the eighteenth century. The sense of distinctiveness that had been felt by the students in these schools was now en­ hanced by the new Western learning to which the Chiushi students were exposed, as well as by the feeling that China was confronting an urgent crisis. The students at the school were immersed in a situation in which they lived together in areas separated from their families and much of the outside world, where they engaged in a learning process emphasizing that certain age levels were related to certain degrees of ac­ ademic achievement, and where they studied a cultural pattern and set of ideas totally dissimilar to those of their tradition. As a result of these new experiences and living patterns, Chinese students began to develop a feeling of separateness from their society as well as a conception of youth as a special phase of social development.45 Since the ideas they were studying were those which supposedly contained answers to the myriad of problems confronting China, many of these youth developed a particular sense of mission about their role within Chinese society as well as a feeling of hostility—sometimes even re­ belliousness—toward the ideas and traditions of their elders. In 1901 several of the students and teachers at the Chiushi Academy were expelled after being involved in a minor but highly celebrated confrontation with the Qing government over the insertion of an antigovernment phrase in an essay 44 Chen

Duxiu, Yangzi jiang xingshi lunlue. Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement, p. 96. Also see Marion Levy, The Family Revolution in Modern China, p. 90. 45

AWAKENING YOUTH

37

circulated among the students and faculty.46 Chen is rumored to have been among those forced to flee the school after speak­ ing out about the incident.47 According to some sources, Chen went first to Nanjing, where Zhang Shizhao was running a kind of underground revolutionary dormitory. Chen was cer­ tainly in Nanjing in 1901-1902, for it was there that he was to become acquainted with his lifelong friend and sometime benefactor, Wang Mengzou.48 By the end of 1902, Chen was in Japan, where he and other former participants in the Chiushi Academy helped establish the Youth Society (Qingnian hui), the first avowedly revolutionary organization among Chinese students in Japan.49 In Japan even more than at Chiushi, the Chinese students nurtured a sense of themselves as different from the rest of their society. Far from home, suddenly confronted with the necessity of thinking of themselves in nationalist terms as a result of the alien, often hostile, environment in which they were living, the Chinese students naturally began to develop a distinct culture and life style. This was reinforced by the Japanese students with whom the young Chinese then came into contact, for the Japanese students were themselves 46 For an account of this see Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries, p. 142. 47 See Chow, May Fourth Movement, p. 42. This may have been based on He Zhiyu, "Duxiu zhuzuo nianbiao" [A chronology of Chen Duxiu], in Duxiu Congshu Qizhong [Seven works by Duxiu], vol. 1 (Shanghai, 1948), p. 2. He mentions Chen fleeing in 1901 after giving an anti-Manchu speech and then meeting up with Zhang Shizhao. He, however, is referring to Chen's flight from Anhui following the dissolution of the Anhui Patriotic Society in 1903. His date here was off by two years. 48 Wang Mengzou, "Dongya jianshi" [A brief history of the East Asian Publishing House], in Anhui gemingshi yanjiu ziliao, vol. 1, p. 10. 49 Feng Ziyou, Geming yishi [Anecdotes of the Chinese revolution], vol. 1, pp. 151-54; vol. 3, pp. 67-70. Zhang Shizhao, "Shu huangdi hun" [Com­ ments on the spirit of the yellow emperor], in Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi chuanguo weiyuan hui wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuan hui (Com­ mittee on written materials of the national committee of the Chinese people's political consultive conference), ed., Xinhai geming huiyi Iu [A record of remembrances of the 1911 revolution], vol. l,p. 130. See also Chun-tu Hsueh, Huang Hsing and the Chinese Revolution, p. 8.

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undergoing a period of cultural change. Most important, the Chinese students' sense of distinctness was buttressed by the earthshaking (to them) ideas then being studied in Japan. The turn-of-the-century liberal democratic and scientific concepts they studied told the students in Spencerian terms that change was inevitable and that progress would come to those who threw off the fetters of family, superstition, and political repression and allowed the emergence of their individual po­ tential—a potential that youth in general and Chinese youth in particular under these heady circumstances tended to value very highly. Under the influence of these notions and the new cultural norms and dress to which they were exposed, Chinese youth now attempted to mold themselves into the embodiment of this emancipation from traditional norms and habits. The sense of self-importance and rebellion that had always been present in the Ming and Qing academies and even earlier, and had caused the traditional examination-time madness de­ scribed vividly by Chen in his autobiography, could now ex­ press itself as part of a full-fledged student culture. The name of the student group Chen Duxiu helped form in Japan, the Youth Society, reflected the youths' new feeling about themselves as a special group capable of revitalizing their country.50 The name was taken from that of another political association of youth who had played an important role in the transformation of their country. This was the Young Italy society organized by the leader of the Italian unification movement, Giuseppe Mazzini. The Chinese students greatly admired Mazzini as a promoter of national independence and leader of youthful revolutionaries. Besides Chen Duxiu, the Youth Society's members included many of the famous early nationalist leaders, such as Zhang Ji, Su Manshu, and Feng Ziyou. Members of the Youth Society became especially concerned about Russian activities in the Manchurian provinces, an area of interest to the Chen family. In April 1903 most of the group formed a student volunteer army, which rather superciliously 50

Ibid.

AWAKENING YOUTH

39

offered its services to the Qing government to help fight the Russians, demonstrating not only their nationalist sentiments but also their condescending attitude toward their govern­ ment's capabilities. Chen Duxiu departed from Japan shortly after this army was formed (it was subsequently disbanded by the Qing gov­ ernment), expelled for his part in a frequently cited episode. Chen and several of his fellow students had broken into the office of the government agent appointed to watch over Hubei student affairs in Japan. The man had made himself especially unpopular with his attempts to regulate the activities of all the Chinese students in Japan; the students also felt that he had been guilty of sexual improprieties. To punish the agent, Zhang Ji and Zou Rong held the man down, while Chen Duxiu manned scissors and cut off the man's queue, which was later hung in the Chinese student union.51 This incident created a sensation among the radical students in Japan and caused a diplomatic uproar that ended in the expulsion of Chen Duxiu and his cohorts.52 Zou Rong and Zhang Ji went off to Shanghai, where Zou Rong made the acquaintance of the activist scholar Zhang Binglin and became involved in the radical student newspaper, the Subao. When this paper ran afoul of the authorities in mid-1903, Zhang and Zou were imprisoned, and Zou Rong eventually died in jail. Chen Duxiu was not directly involved in the Subao in­ cident. After leaving Japan, he returned to his native Anhui, where in the space of a few short months he helped establish a small revolutionary library, which later grew into the basis for the Anhui provincial library. He also participated in the Youth Determination Study Society (Qingnian lizhi xuehui),53 an organization of like-minded political reformists, and then helped form the first major Anhui revolutionary group, the 51 Zhang

Shizhao, "Shu huangdi hun," p. 229.

52 Ibid. 53 Li Fanqun, "Chen Duxiu nianbiao buzhong," p. 226. See also Ren Jianshu, Wu Xinzhong, and Zhang Tongmo, "Chen Duxiu he Anhui suhua bao" [Chen Duxiu and the Anhui Vernacular Journal], in Dangshi ziliao [Materials on party history], vol. 1, pp. 69-78.

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Anhui Patriotic Society (Anhui aiguo hui), to organize his fellow students in mobilizing sentiment in his native province against the Russian usurpation of Manchuria.54 The zeal that Chen and these other students demonstrated in all of their activities stemmed from their sense of themselves as part of a special group that would replace the scholargentry class. This sentiment was expressed vividly in an article published by Chinese students in Japan. In the Hubei Student World (Hubei xuesheng jie), Li Shuceng maintained that the students occupied a unique position between the corrupt un­ changeable officials on the top and the uncultured common people on the bottom. The officials, he insisted, because of their tendency to jockey for power, were naturally inclined to yield to the foreigners. The job of the student intellectuals was therefore to bypass the officials and to lead the people, teach­ ing the commoners about the skills and democratic institutions of the West.55 In forming his Anhui Patriotic Society, Chen manifested what was to become his lifelong belief that the principal actors within the society should no longer be the scholar-gentry but the new student stratum. THE ANHUI PATRIOTIC SOCIETY

Chen based the Anhui Patriotic Society in his native town of Anqing in 1903, shortly after the provincial capital had been made into a treaty port under the terms of the SinoBritish trade agreement of 1902.S6 The organization was com­ posed primarily of students from the three major institutions of higher learning in the province, the Anhui Upper Level School, the Military Preparatory Academy, and the Tong54 "Anhui aiguohui zhi chengjiu" [The establishment of the Anhui Patriotic Society], Subao, May 25, 1903, pp. 1—2. 55 Li Shucheng, "Xuesheng zhi jingzheng" [Student struggle], Hubei xue­ sheng jie [Hubei Student World] 2:9. 56 For a discussion of the effects of this, see Anhui kexue fen yuan lishi yanjiu shi jindaishi zu diaocha [The investigative branch for modern history in the Anhui Scientific Institute's Department of Historical Research], "Wuhu dichu de xinhai geming" [The 1911 Revolution in the Wuhu area], Anhui shixue tongsu [The Anhui Historical Studies Bulletin], 14 (Dec. 1959):1.

AWAKENING YOUTH

41

cheng Public School.57 Chen's new group was able to take advantage of both the nationalist sentiment aroused by the imperialist incursions into his native province and the newly developed political consciousness of the youth in Anhui— feelings similar to those he had already observed among the Chinese students in Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Tokyo. Chen clearly saw the student members of his society as a group that would assume the role of leading the masses. The constitution that he helped write for the Anhui Patriotic So­ ciety announced that "because the foreign calamity is daily growing worse, the society seeks to unite the masses into an organization that will develop patriotic thought and stir up a martial spirit, so people will grab their weapons to protect their country and restore our basic national sovereignty."58 This proclamation was followed by a series of prohibitions. Individual freedom that "interfered with the national welfare" would not be permitted, but at the same time members were warned against "blindly hating all foreigners" in the pursuit of that welfare. Furthermore, members were forbidden "all vices such as smoking cigarettes, visiting prostitutes, and gam­ bling."59 Instead, a rigorous physical and moral regimen was prescribed. Those who joined the society had to exercise daily, in regular physical education classes if possible but otherwise in self-organized groups; anyone missing more than three ex­ ercise sessions was to be expelled from the organization. This concern with moral rectitude and physical vigor, which has been a common element of many youth groups throughout the world, was especially prevalent among the early (and later) Chinese student revolutionary groups. Exercise groups were particularly widespread. In March 1903 the Patriotic School in Shanghai (founded by Cai Yuanpei and closely associated with the Subao) established a physical-education society that it hoped would spread throughout the country; one month after the start of this program, Chen affiliated his Anhui Pa57 "Anhui

aiguohui zhi chengjiu," pp. 1-2. aiguohui nizhang" [Proposed constitution of the Anhui Patriotic Society], Subao, June 7, 1903. 59 Ibid. 58 "Anhui

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triotic Society with the school.60 Since physical strength and vitality are prime characteristics of youth, it is not surprising that the students involved in the early Chinese youth move­ ment stressed the need for physical activity; one would imag­ ine they had felt extraordinarily frustrated by the years of solely mental efforts necessary for the study of their Confucian classics. They felt this was especially important since one of China's prime problems at that time was the obvious physical weakness of the nation's military. Chen remained convinced throughout his life that physical well-being was the cure to many of the ills of Chinese society. It was a concern he was to share with Mao Zedong, whose first published article was an essay on the virtues of exercise, selected by Chen in 1917 for the pages of New Youth.61 All this huffing and puffing by Anhui Patriotic Society mem­ bers to get into shape was directed to the opposition of a secret treaty that had just been signed between the Chinese and Russian governments, giving the Russians considerable economic and political power in Manchuria.62 "If our gov­ ernment allows this treaty," Chen Duxiu maintained in an emotional speech to an overflow crowd at the organizational meeting of the Anhui Patriotic Society, "every nation will moisten its lips and help itself to a part of China,"63 and in the end China will not have "one foot or inch of clean land."64 Chen was particularly adamant in his denunciation of this treaty because he had personally seen the Russian occupation of Manchuria in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion. And, as he related to his audience in graphic detail, he had also observed firsthand the brutality of the Russian troops and officials in Manchuria toward the Chinese population, as well as the 60 Chen

Youji (Chen Duxiu), "Anhui aiguohui yanshuo" [Lecture to the Anhui Patriotic Society], Subao, May 26,1903, p. 2. See also "Anhui aiguohui zhi chengjiu." 61 Ershibahua (Mao Zedong), "Tiyu zhi yanjiu" [A study of athletics], Xirt Qingnian [New Youth], vol. 3, no. 2 (April 1, 1917). 62 Chen Youji (Chen Duxiu), "Anhui aiguohui yanshuo." See also "Anhui aiguohui zhi chengjiu." 63 Chen Youji (Chen Duxiu), "Anhui aiguohui yanshuo." 64 "Anhui aiguohui zhi chengjiu."

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43

subservience of the Qing government officials (perhaps in­ cluding his uncle) in this area toward the Russians. Chen, like almost all Chinese revolutionaries and reformers, felt that if the Chinese people were to stand a chance of defeating the Russians, they would have to unite. "When we go to war with our Russian enemies, we must be united. If there is one person not willing to fight to the death against the Russians, then none of us can be considered manly."65 Chen was not overly optimistic that this united struggle on the part of the Chinese people would occur. Chen deplored, as he would throughout his life, what he considered to be the backward, self-serving traditions of the Chinese people. "The Chinese people," he feared, "do not know how to struggle for glory or against insults. They seek to live dishonorably in the world, willingly receiving the extermination of their coun­ try (mieguo) and their own enslavement."66 Reversing West­ ern stereotypes of "oriental" imperviousness to death in the defense of honor, Chen maintained that the "foreigners' char­ acter is such that they will struggle for glory or against insult, lightly regarding matters of life and death. They prefer to die for their nation rather than live as slaves."67 The Chinese, however, "only know how to covet life and fear death. Even when they are insulted, they are afraid to show any opposi­ tion."68 Comments like these earned Chen a reputation for gloomy words; years later Li Dazhao was to complain about the "fog of pessimism" that hung over the writings of Chen and many other intellectuals in the wake of the failure of the 1913 rev­ olution.69 It is true that such pessimism pervaded Chen's writ­ ings not only after 1913 but well before 1911—no doubt in part a result of his disillusionment with the traditional Chinese elite. But since Chen also had hope for the new youth organ65

Chen Youji (Chen Duxiu), "Anhui aiguohui yanshuo." Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Li Dazhao, "Yanshi xin yu zijue xin" [Pessimism and self-consciousness], Jiayin zazhi, vol. 1, no. 9 (Aug. 10, 1915). 66

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izations such as the Anhui Patriotic Society, he was actually not as pessimistic as he sometimes sounded. What Li did not realize is that these statements of criticism were in part rhe­ torical—designed to spur Chen's audience into action by taunting them so that they would not depend on their gov­ ernment and its officials but act for themselves. In the speech just quoted, Chen made this very clear by following up his negative remarks with a question. "Alas, are we Chinese really like this? Or is it that other countries are only boasting ... ? We should take the responsibility of struggling to the death to protect our land."70 Another explanation for the harshness of Chen's language can be found in the "moral passion" he displayed throughout his life in his vehement attacks on traditional leaders and ideas. Ironically, in his autobiography Chen criticized the stria moralism of his grandfather, his first Confucian teacher, and im­ plied that it was a result of the Confucian tradition.71 Chen of course was not aware that he displayed a similarly strict moralism; in fact he criticized himself for being too weak. But the concern for moral rectitude that is part of the Confucian tradition has often led to a fear of moral weakness among Confucians. It has been suggested that Liang Shuming, four­ teen years younger than Chen, was testing his moral rectitude when he publicly remonstrated with Mao Zedong in 1953.72 In Chinese tradition, a sense of moral rectitude is so closely associated with Confucianism that Mao Zedong's teacher, Yang Changji, a Kantian scholar who was a friend of Chen Duxiu and a writer for New Youth, was, in spite of his very antitraditional ideas, popularly known among his students as the "Confucianist" precisely "because of his stern regard for morality";73 the description could also be used in that context for Chen Duxiu himself. 70 Chen

Youji (Chen Duxiu), "Anhui aiguohui yanshuo." Chen Duxiu, Shian zizhuan. 72 Guy S. Alito, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity, esp. the first chapter. 73 Frederick Wakeman, Jr., History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung's Thought, p. 157. 71

AWAKENING YOUTH

45

Thus this "moral passion" of Chen's was no doubt at least in part a result of the lingering influence of the Confucian culture in which Chen had been immersed prior to 1897. As Thomas Metzger has pointed out, "for Confucians, man in his ordinary condition has available to him a power which the Judeo-Christian tradition reserves for God."74 This meant that man has the ability to utilize his "unique moral energy with complete objectivity, to achieve a society free of the distortions of self-interest."75 Such a viewpoint put a tremen­ dous amount of pressure on the individual to ensure that his actions were correctly motivated. This Confucian belief in the power of moral thinking assumed that if an individual's ac­ tions, or at least the actions of a small determined minority, were benevolent and sincere, they would have far-reaching effects. Consequently, the doctrine placed a premium on moral behavior. One further explanation of the moral passion Chen dis­ played can be found in the nature of the youth groups with which he was involved. Youth is a time when one is partic­ ularly concerned with "fidelity,"76 and one can imagine that this concern was greatly magnified among the Confucian-in­ fluenced Chinese youth groups with which Chen was asso­ ciated. Thus his moralistic message proved attractive to his youthful audiences, accustomed as they were to the traditional categories of Confucian thought. In the speech mentioned above, Chen aimed most of his venom at those who "talk about loyalty and filial piety and criticize others as rebels." When there is a national crisis, they will not work for the public good. Their only thought is to put their money into foreign banks. The plan that they embrace is to sell out to the enemy to protect themselves. . .. If these na74 Thomas Metzger, Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture, p. 38. 75 Ibid. 76 Erik Erikson, "Youth: Fidelity and Diversity," in Erik Erikson, ed., The Challenge of Youth, pp. 1-27.

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tional traitors and rebels are not slain our country will be lost.77 Chen felt nearly as much disdain for those indifferent on­ lookers who "only care about themselves and their families and are unconcerned about national affairs, considering the order and prosperity of the nation to be solely the govern­ ment's responsibility."78 What these people did not under­ stand, Chen Duxiu explained, was the relationship between their own affairs and those of the nation. And finally Chen looked down on "the intellectuals who seem totally to un­ derstand the problem, but who do not really understand. . . . The things this type of person says may seem very true, but they cannot be implemented."79 Chen Duxiu was well aware of the tendency of some thinkers to make the mistake of seeing things from only a theoretical point of view. Though some­ times guilty of the fault himself, Chen, even in his most in­ tellectual writings, constantly cautioned against it. He insisted on the necessity of practicality and direct empirical knowl­ edge—a heritage, perhaps, of his uncle's cold, hard world of horse-trading with the Russians and soybean buying with the British. Indeed, the position of Chen's family was in many ways similar to that of the student audience Chen hoped to arouse with his speech. Both groups were newly arisen, still somewhat alienated from the traditional gentry and yet identified with their presumptions and privileges. In this situation, Chen, like the writer in the Hubei Student World quoted earlier,80 tended to assume a special relationship with the masses; Chen felt his student audience had a duty to awaken the masses to the dangers confronting China. Though Chen had roasted the Chinese upper crust earlier in his speech, he had great hope for "those deceived rustics who do not know about the oppressive treaty with the Rus77 Chen

Youji (Chen Duxiu), "Anhui aiguohui yanshuo." Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 See note 42. 78

AWAKENING YOUTH

47

sians or the [threatened] division of their country and so have no basis on which to develop ideas of patriotism. The despised humble peasants of the countryside are all in this category," and, Chen stated, they "encompass eighty or ninety percent of the people."81 Chen was never to have the simple populist belief that the poor and humble were naturally good. He agreed, though, with those who felt that the largest problem was simply that the Chinese masses were "lacking patriotic sentiment,"82 energetically insisting that this problem could be solved by prodding the masses into expressing their "nat­ ural spirit."83 Unfortunately, he lamented, the masses were at that point near death, and unless they were stirred to fight they would perish. Chen believed that the small group of people who had re­ sponded to his message could develop a new relationship with the masses. As he put it: "We must get rid of our usual selfish opinions and strive to uphold the goal of patriotism and union with the masses [hequn\."S4 To this end, Chen divided his new organization into two parts, a lecturing society and a news­ paper, to disseminate this information among the commoners. Chen did not immediately achieve all of these goals, but he did stir his listeners into action. Right after the meeting at which he spoke, a group of students from the Anhui Academy who had attended the speech confronted their school super­ intendent, demanding a change in restrictive school regula­ tions and an increased emphasis on physical education classes so that the students could prepare themselves physically to fight the Russians. They also asked to be allowed to telegram a petition to the higher governmental authorities to urge them to take whatever action was necessary to block the treaty with the Russians.85 81 Chen

Youji (Chen Duxiu), "Anhui aiguohui yanshuo."

82 Ibid. 83

Ibid.

84 Ibid. 85 "Anhui daxuetang zuzhi xuesheng jue qingxing" [The circumstances of Anhui Higher School's hindering of students involved in expelling the Rus­ sians], Subao, May 29, 1903, p. 2. See also "Anhui shengcheng daxuetang

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The results in Anhui were similar to those of the student demonstrations in Shanghai and Tokyo. Nearly a week of altercations between the students and the educational au­ thorities ended with the dismissal of several students and the withdrawal of several others.86 The provincial officials issued a warrant for the arrest of Chen Duxiu for having instigated the disturbances and prohibited any further public speeches in the area.87 Chen Duxiu, however, was forewarned about the order for his arrest and managed to leave town before he could be apprehended.88 But before departing, Chen provoked similar incidents at other schools throughout the area.89 Though Chen had to flee, his experiences with the Anhui Patriotic Society helped him to develop his concept of youth— particularly those gentry youth who had not become part of the scholar-official class—as a moral group that should as­ sume leadership of society. Moreover, Chen learned how con­ tagious the student culture he had earlier imbibed in Tokyo had now become. Living together in their dormitories away from home, Chinese students in Anhui had begun to form groups and ideas similar to those of the Chinese students in Tokyo.

THE YOUTH CULTURE

From Anhui, Chen journeyed to Shanghai, where he joined the staff of the China National Gazette (Guomin riri bao). This paper was the successor to the famous Subao on which Zhang Binglin and Zou Rong as well as Zhang Shizhao had di yici chengtu zhi yuanyin" [The reasons for the first conflict at the Anhui Higher School in the Anhui capital], Subao, May 26, 1903, pp. 2-3. 86 Ibid. Also, "Zaiji anqing daxuetang wubei xuetang tongcheng xuetang chengtu shi" [Another account of the conflict at Anqing's Upper Level School, the Military Preparatory Academy, and the Tongcheng Academy], Subao, May 30, 1903, p. 2. 87 "Anhui daxuetang zuzhi," "Anhui shengcheng daxuetang," and "Zaiji anqing daxuetang." 88 "Anhui shengcheng daxuetang." 89 "Zaiji anqing daxuetang."

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worked.90 Before its demise, the Subao had printed accounts of Chen Duxiu's Anhui Patriotic Society. When a successor to this paper was established by Zhang Shizhao, it was natural for him to invite Chen Duxiu to work on it. Like its predecessor, the China National Gazette appealed to the new generation of students, addressing them as the natural leaders of Chinese society. Although the China Na­ tional Gazette did not maintain the strident tone and feistiness on current issues that characterized the Subao, the paper did mount a radical attack on the cultural and intellectual foun­ dations of traditional Chinese civilization, similar to the as­ sault Chen Duxiu was to launch eight years later in the pages of the culturally radical but seemingly politically moderate New Youth. The China National Gazette seethed with the moralism of these radical youths who were sure that their education had provided them with an understanding of society their elders did not possess. Article after article in the magazine emphasized the necessity of historical progress and nation­ alism and contained characterizations of the Chinese people, family, culture, and government as constituting a slave society. The denunciations of the culture and morals of the scholargentry class in particular were similar in tone and content to many of the writings of the later New Culture movement.91 90 Zhang Shizhao, "Subao an shimo jixu" [A complete narration of the Subao case], in Chai Degeng et al., comps., Xinhai geming [The revolution of 1911 ], vol. 1, pp. 388-89. Zhang Shizhao, "Yu Huang Keqiang xiangjiao shimo" [The complete account of my acquaintance with Huang Xing], in Xinhai geming, vol. 2, pp. 338-50. Feng Ziyou, Zhonghua minguo kaiguo qian geming shi [A history of the revolution prior to the founding of the Republic of China], pp. 139—42; idem, Geming yishi [Anecdotes of the Chinese Revolution], vol. 1, p. 125; vol. 2, pp. 84—85. Liu Yazi, "Ji Chen Zhongfu xiansheng guanyu Su Manshu de tanhua" [A talk with Chen Duxiu con­ cerning his remembrances of Su Manshu], in Liu Wuji, Su Manshu nianpu ji qida [A yearly record of Su Manshu and other items], p. 284. Feng Ziyou, Zhongguo geming yundong ershiliunian zuzhi shi [Twenty-six years' organ­ izational history of the Chinese revolutionary movement], p. 76. 91 Examples of some of these articles in the Guomin riri bao are "Daotong ban" [The handling of the orthodoxy of precepts], vol. 2, no. 33, pp. 1-7; "Zhen nuli" [An exhortation to slaves], vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 6-26; "Nuli yu xu" [A preface to slave jail], vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 15-18.

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Unfortunately, the articles in the short-lived China National Gazette were not signed, so Chen's specific contributions can­ not be identified; but at least one article, "Admonition to Youth" (Zhen xiaonian), has a title and content that fore­ shadow "Call to Youth" (Qinggao qingnian), the famous lead article, signed by Chen, in New Youth (originally called Youth Magazine).92 Both pieces equate the position of youth with that of the nation, the China National Gazette article claim­ ing: "If the youth's position is venerable and serious, the na­ tion's position is venerable and serious. When the youth's position is humble, the nation's position is humble."93 The two articles associate youth with a vigorous and fresh con­ dition of mind but express the fear that it is all too easy for young people to lose their "youthful qualities." The China National Gazette piece even closes by warning, in a tone that would be very typical of New Youth, that one should not bear "the foul air brought into human circles by Chan (or Zen) Buddhism and Confucius. If we are not to grow old and not to die we must whip up our creative spirit and encourage it to expand into the limitless heaven and earth."94 Years later, in founding New Youth, Chen insisted that the purpose of his magazine was to train a new generation to uphold and develop its culture.95 Youth, he maintained, could bring vitality and growth to a society, but only if the young obtained a "self-awareness" of their responsibility and will­ ingness "to struggle . . . to exert one's intellect, discard res­ olutely the old and the rotten, regard them as enemies and as 92 "Zhen xiaonian" [Admonition to youth], Guomin riribao, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 13-15. Chen Duxiu, "Qinggao qingnian" [Call to youth], Qingnian zazhi, vol. 1, no. 1 (Sept. 15, 1915). Zheng Xuejia has pinpointed several articles in the China National Gazette that he thinks may have been written by Chen. See "Ban Xin qingnian qian Chen Duxiu shenghuo de pianduan" [A slice of Chen Duxiu's life before his editing of New Youth], in Zhonggong xingwang shi IA history of the rise and fall of the Chinese Communist Party], app. 4, pp. 764-84. 93 "Zhen xiaonian." *> Ibid. 95 Chen Duxiu, "Reply to Wang Yuangong," Qingnian zazhi [Youth Mag­ azine], vol. 1, no. 1 (Sept. 13, 1915).

AWAKENING YOUTH

51

a flood or savage beasts, keep away from their neighborhood and refuse to be contaminated by their poisonous germs. .. ."96 This insistence on maintaining the purity of spirit of the young— similar to the mandate that the Confucian gentleman is sup­ posed to remain pure of heart in order to serve as a moral example for others—was the major element in Chen's own faith in youth as a new group of leaders for Chinese society. A celebration of youth characterizes many radical move­ ments, whose members typically are young and who consider the qualities of spontaneity and daring necessary for revolu­ tionary activity. Indeed, the figure of the "ideal youth," which has been a standard character in popular myth, has tended to replace the yeoman and untutored peasant as a cult personality in modern revolutionary ideology.97 In China, it is clear, this emphasis on youth was a reaction to the value the scholargentry had placed on age and unchanging sobriety. The writ­ ten record shows that in the early part of this century, Chen Duxiu was the originator of the idea that the fate of the Chinese nation depended on the way its youth were treated. As Chen's ideas on youth were crystallizing, he was becom­ ing totally immersed in the new student culture in Shanghai. Here the life style of the students seemed to exemplify the liberation from family and tradition that was necessary to bring about development and growth in all of China. Among those working on the China National Gazette with Chen Duxiu in the spring and summer of 1903 were Zhang Ji and Su Manshu, with whom he had been associated in the Youth Society in Japan, as well as Zhang Shizhao, who had been the editor of the original Subao.9S Chen Duxiu and several other 96 Chen Duxiu, "Qinggao qingnian." This translation borrows heavily from Chow Tse-tsung, May Fourth Movement, p. 46. 97 Philip Abrams, "Rites de Passage: The Conflict of Generations in In­ dustrial Society," Journal of Contemporary History, 5 (1970):178. 98 Zhang Shizhao, "Subao an shimo jixu" [A complete narration of the Subao case], in Xinhai geming [The Revolution of 1911], comp. Chai Degeng, 1:388-89. Yan Duhou, "Xinhai geming shiqi shanghai xinwenjie dongtai" [Developments in Shanghai newspaper circles around the time of the 1911 revolution], Xinhai geming huiyi Iu 4:78. Zhang Shizhao, "Shuangping ji" [A record of both sides of the chess board], Jiayin zazhi, vol. 1, no. 4 (Oct.

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members of the editorial staff shared communal living facil­ ities, and revolutionary comrades from different areas contin­ ually drifted in and out of their house. Years later, Zhang Shizhao, who, as mentioned earlier, ran a revolutionary dor­ mitory in Nanjing around 1902 where Chen Duxiu may have hidden for a short time, recalled that he, Chen, and He Meishi, another roommate who was a former student at the Shanghai Patriotic School, would often spend their nights proofreading copy for the next morning's paper." During work hours Chen Duxiu and his friends crowded into tiny, poorly lit lofts, which were so narrow that Chen later described himself and He Meishi as being literally kneeto-knee while writing and propagandizing.100 During their leisure they frequented bars and sought the company of dancehall girls, often overindulging in wine, food, and sex.101 Su Manshu, who moved in with Chen Duxiu for a while, was supposed to have been particularly renowned for his con­ sumption of food and cigars, habits that may have helped hasten his early demise.102 The eccentric Su, who had gone through the motions of joining a Buddhist holy order a few years earlier in order to avoid an arranged marriage, would 11, 1914). Zhang Shizhao, "Shu huangdi hun" [Comments on the spirit of the yellow emperor], in Xinbai geming huiyi lu, 1:212-304. Feng Ziyou, Getning yishi [Fragments of revolutionary history], 1:195-96. Chen Duxiu, "Ji Chen Zhongfu guanyu Su Manshu de tanhua" [Transcripts of a discussion with Chen Zhongfu concerning Su Manshu], in Liu Yazi, Su Manshu nianpu ji qida [A yearly record of Su Manshu and other items], p. 284. 99 Zhang Shizhao, "Shuangping ji." 100 Chen Duxiu, "Yemeng wangyou He Meishi jue er fuci" [A night dream about my lost friend He Meishi and then awakening and committing it to verse], Jingzhong ribao [The Alarm Bell Daily], May 7, 1904. 101 Jingzhong ribao, Aug. 30, 1904, p. 4, and Jan. 1, 1905, p. 4. 102 Henry McAleavy, Su Man-shu: A Sino-Japanese Genius, p. 49. Leo Oufan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, pp. 58-59. Su Manshu, "Yu mojun shu" [A letter to a certain gentleman], in Manshu dashi jinian /